Web Podcast - Episode 11: Creating a Blog

Read the transcription of this podcast:

So everyone, today episode 11 we’re talking about blogs and blog posts.
A lot of people that have a website often ask me if it’s a good idea that they include a blog on their website. There’s a few reasons definitely why it’s great and a few why it’s not so great.

Let’s start with the bad stuff. The reason it’s not so great is the amount of effort you need to put into it. When I say effort I don’t mean actually sitting down and labouring away doing two hours for one single blog post. It’s more along the lines of having a schedule and a rhythm. Making a habit of writing blog posts.

You have to put time, at least making time to make a post once every two weeks, twice a month. To do a blog post and keep your site up to date. Once a month is fine also, but the more regular you do, the more professional you look.
If you go to a site and the posts are staggered, or they haven't made a post in six months, or theres a big gap between a few of them, it can look a little less trustworthy because you ask yourself why they’re not posting blog posts, do they just get too busy or have they gone AWOL for a bit? That’s a thing you’ve got to be careful of if you do them. You have to really make a habit of it and get them done regularly.

Myself, for my business, I do them once or twice a month.I could do it better, but that’s what you really have to do. Keep it regular, once or twice a month leaning towards the twice a month as it’s better to have that rhythm in place.

When you write the content for them, another disadvantage people worry about is getting it perfect. You don’t have to write the post perfect, there’s a lot of people that spend hours revising and rewriting the post 100 times. Just get the bloody thing going and start writing grammatically and functionally sound posts. If people can read it, it’s plain and it works with them, they can understand it, that’s the main thing. Don’t get carried away about making it the perfect blog that only a bloody professional author could write. Just do your best and make sure it’s got the right spelling, then get it up there. Don’t waste time pissing around (excuse the language).

Adding a blog post is definitely a good thing to do, the benefits are, SEO wise, you’ll get better ranking because you have more content to give people. Google sees your website as having more content and Google is really focused on how the content benefits the user.

If the content is good and relates to the user, rather than a load of keyword cramming junk, then you should find it helps with your Google ranking. When you’re naming the blog post, it’s good to think about the titles in relation to what somebody may search on Google. For example, I may write a blog post about how to set up a website hosting, my blog title would obviously be “How To Set Up Website Hosting”, so that people that go and Google set up website hosting are more likely to see the article. While most of them will do it themselves and probably not enquire for us to help them, we do get the odd one who does screw it up then they come to us and ask us to sort it out for them.
So, at the end of the day, they’re definitely a good avenue to go down. Both SEO wise and also positioning yourself and your business as an expert.

That’s another benefit. You have to think about it, this will tell you whether a blog is good idea for your website. How many other people in your industry actually do a blog post and keep their blog up to date? Even their social media like Facebook, that’s a thing. Keep it all up to date, keep it fresh, keep it informative and I guarantee you’ll get work from it.

So that’s some information about blog posts guys. Check out my blog, the podcast is separate, [inaudible 04:24] my blog for some ideas at razorweb.co.nz under news tab.

You can see the headlines I use. I’m no professional writer by any means but I write it out for half an hour, I check it over, and I publish it and get it going.

Cool, that’s Matt from RAZOR Web guys, hope you enjoyed it. Like and subscribe, cheers.